LitPick Review
Fifteen-year-old Winston Fletcher and her grandma Nanny have a really good story to tell the police if they get thrown in jail. Winston’s fame-chasing mother, Skye Harper, has sent a letter begging for help. Her life has not been as glamorous as she thought it would be when she left eleven years ago, and Las Vegas is not a good city for the poor. While Winston is perfectly content spending the summer of 1972 swimming, watching the Olympics, and crying over General Hospital, Nanny feels the maternal need to help her daughter. The lack of a good car leads Nanny to “borrow” a motor home while its wealthy owners are in Europe. What starts as a risky business gets even messier when Winston realizes that the owners’ son– and her longtime crush– is asleep in the motor home. The road trip from New Smryna, Florida to Las Vegas, Nevada brings events that no character will soon forget.
Opinion:
Signed, Skye Harper takes place in a small town during the hot, school-free months of the year. The characters all have their funny or emotional moments, but they mostly seem like cliches rather than real people. The romance between poor girl Winston and the rich boy, Steve, is sweet. However, it is also rushed and unbelievable. What does makes the book memorable is the rich bounty of 70’s references. It was easy to imagine Winston strolling to Piggly-Wiggly in bell-bottoms and flip-flops, getting a Sports Illustrated with Olympic hero Mark Spitz on the cover. Since the novel is told in a series of bite-size chapters, I was able to fly right through it. The down side of those little chapters was that there was not enough time for the reader to get used to the characters. However, the ending earns the book points for setting the reader up to believe one ending, then– bam!– another one comes along. Signed, Skye Harper earns a solid total of three stars for presenting a tale about love, family, and the power of dreams.
